Rob Ford nixes radio show, Gawker bid to buy 'crack' video hits $60K

TORONTO — Toronto Mayor Rob Ford will not be hosting his weekly radio show this weekend after explosive allegations that he was recorded on a video appearing to smoke crack-cocaine.

CFRB program director Mike Bendixen has tweeted that Ford and his brother Doug, a city councillor, won’t be behind the microphones this Sunday for their two-hour talk show The City on the Toronto station.

Bendixen says the Ford brothers told the station on Friday the show would not go ahead as scheduled, but expected it would be back on the air next weekend.

Spoke with Doug Ford, he tells me "I have never seen my brother involved with anything like coke."
#topoli

Gawker’s John Cook reported the video was shown to him by an alleged drug dealer who has been reportedly trying to sell the video for at least $100,000.

Gawker is trying to raise $200,000 from the public, which it says it needs in order to buy the video to post on the gossip-news site. By Saturday evening it had raised more than $60,000 toward its goal.

In its report, the Star said two of its reporters had watched the video on May 3 that it said showed an intoxicated Ford in a room, sitting in a chair, and lighting and smoking from what appeared to be a glass crack pipe.

The Star story also alleges Mr. Ford makes several disparaging and crude remarks about the high school football team he coaches and Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, whom he allegedly called a “fag.”

Gawker’s John Cook reported hearing someone off screen, not the mayor, use the term “faggot,” and thought it was in reference to Pierre Trudeau, not his son.

Gawker and the Star also published the same photo, given to them by their tipster, that depicts the mayor standing with a group of people, one of whom looks like Anthony Smith, a man who was gunned down outside a Toronto nightclub in March. The photo shows Ford dressed in the same sweatshirt he was wearing when photographed by the National Post while jogging around an Etobicoke track last year in a bid to lose weight.

Doug Ford told CFRB on Saturday that “I have never seen my brother involved with anything like coke.”

Ford’s lawyer Dennis Morris called the reports “false and defamatory.” Morris also told the newspaper it was impossible to tell what a person was smoking by watching the video.